Faith & God

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Missionary Support: A Suggestion

How would you like to walk up to one of your friends and ask, “Hey, can I have $50 or $100 a month for the next umpteen years?”

How long do you think they’d stay your friend? Yet, this is what we expect missionaries and many other full-time ministry workers to do. It’s called “support raising.” Pretty awkward, yes?

We’ve managed to sugar coat it somewhat. We tell people it’s their chance to get involved in what God is doing. We promise significance. And if there’s any way we can connect them to what we do, we show photos of starving children or cherubic orphans.

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Supporting Long-term Missions

It used to be that a missionary heading overseas would say good-bye to friends and family with little expectation that they’d ever see any of them again. It was a life-long commitment, and frequently that life would be very short.

These days, any Christian can be a missionary. According to David Livermore, author of Serving with Eyes Wide Open, “four to five million Americans participate in religious short-term mission experiences” each year, spending $2.25 billion (yes, with a “b”) to do so.

At the same time, there are a little over 1.6 million full-time Christian missionaries, most of whom work in already-evangelized areas (Frontier Harvest Ministries). The numbers may be off somewhat (it’s very hard to get an accurate accounting), but the picture is clear—short-term missionaries greatly outnumber full-time workers. Keep that in mind for a moment.

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Geezerhood Already?

I can’t believe it. I just got called a “senior” by some new young pipsqueak of an associate pastor. I am seriously having a hard time with this. I am in my fifties, for heaven’s sake! I will begrudge you “middle aged”—but am I already a senior?! This is like calling a 30-year-old “past their prime.”

While I cringe at being referred to in this way, it does bring up some questions I don’t hear addressed very often—what does God consider “old age”? How does our role change as we get older? Is there some point at which we stop doing and start complaining how things aren’t as good as in the old days?

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The Wages of Sin

I was reading my Google news feed this morning:

The sheer sinfulness implied by the headlines reminded me of a sermon I heard years ago. Entitled “How much is your sin going to cost me?”, it was preached by our former pastor, Ted Haggard, who would have done well to listen to himself. Ted related that he was an overseer for a large church in another state. The previous week, that church’s pastor had admitted to having an affair with another church member, and Ted had had to drop everything and go help the church deal with the crisis. As a result, he wasn’t here in town to perform a wedding for a couple who really wanted him to officiate. This other church’s pastor’s indiscretion had hurt a couple he didn’t even know.

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It’s the End of the World

We’re all heard the hype about the Mayan Calendar ending on December 21, 2012. Did they just run out of rock? Or did they know something? (Then again, we may have the date wrong—see this article on the Discovery News site.)

Of course, most sensible people don’t believe the Mayans predicted the end of the world. Plus, being Bible-believing Christians, we prefer to take God’s word over that of an ancient pagan mesoamerican people group.

Still, the end of the world is coming.

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At Our Doorstep

Are you planning a short-term mission trip this year? Perhaps you’re heading to Mexico or Honduras or the Dominican Republic. Maybe your destination is India, or Ethiopia.

Or maybe you want to welcome your new neighbors who don’t speak your language or share your customs—but you don’t know how.

Do you want to learn more about other cultures, to be more able to relate to people from other nations?

You can visit China—or Mexico, or India—for the price of a few gallons of gas.

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Snow Day

As I write this, tiny snowflakes are falling from pearl-white clouds, adding to the 15 inches we’re already received. I hear the hum of the computer and the whoosh of air coming from the heating vent by my feet, but otherwise it’s totally silent. Even the hungry finches gobbling down sunflower seeds on my bird feeder are strangely quiet.

By the time you read this, the snow will be mostly gone. Living in the rain shadow of the Rockies, we don’t keep clouds around for long. Even now, we aren’t really snowed in. The roads are mostly plowed, and Pete shoveled a couple of wheel tracks down the long driveway so we can get our cars out. But I can pretend.

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Staying On Course

lah_3245-1I bet you can immediately think of at least one Christian leader who is either raising lots of eyebrows or has made a wreck of their ministry. I fact, I bet you can think of several.

They may have started out strong in their faith, building the kingdom, aiming for heaven. But as they gained fame and followers and the pressure began to mount, they veered off course. Sadly, they then either fall into sin or heresy, or both. They end up in the headlines and the church takes another bad rap.

Since my sweetie, Pete, works in full-time ministry, we’ve watched this trail of destruction with holy fear. We take seriously warnings such as in Galatians 6:1—“Brothers and sisters, if someone is caught in a sin, you who live by the Spirit should restore that person gently. But watch yourselves, or you also may be tempted” (italics mine).

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God’s Special Forces

“There are places in the world many fear to tread, places of darkness where most have given up hope of ever trying to make a difference.”

The young man was standing in front of our Sunday school class, showing photos and telling hair-raising stories about smuggling food and Bibles into North Korea. Finding families for children orphaned by genocide in Myanmar. Even extracting persecuted believers from these and other nations that have targeted them for execution.

The U.S. military has special forces teams that engage in high-risk missions. Alpha Relief is one of God’s special forces teams.

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Angry at God

I sat listening to my friend pour out her sorrow and concern for her son. He had been a vibrant believer, praying with authority, intimate with Jesus, a successful evangelist who was planning to go overseas as a missionary. And now he had just proclaimed himself an atheist.

How could someone that close to God suddenly decide that He doesn’t exist? It’s a long story which I won’t elaborate on here, but as best as his parents could piece together, the problem stems from unanswered prayer. He prayed that God would step in and set him free from an addiction—and God didn’t obey him.

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